Bolton on Benghazi: Obama’s people can’t be left alone with our national security

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton appeared on Greta van Susteren’s Fox News program last night, introduced by a devastating montage of the administration’s lies about the attack on our consulate in Benghazi disintegrating under congressional scrutiny.

“The Administration made up its mind what the reality was – whether it was engaged in a cover-up, whether it was ideology that dominated the view, whether it was incompetence… at this point, we don’t know the answer to that. But we know one thing unmistakably: they were flatly wrong. They got it wrong before the attack, they got it wrong after the attack, they’re getting it wrong now.”

He would later describe Benghazi as “a tragedy, and a debacle, and a massive Administration failure.”

“We can psychoanalyze them all we want,” said Bolton, referring to the various theories floating around about the Administration’s motivations for misleading the American people about the Benghazi attack, “but this is a demonstration that these people cannot be left alone in the same room with our national security.”

That was equally evident from the clownish behavior of Democrats at the House Oversight hearings on Wednesday as well, from Rep. Elijah Cummings’ (D-MD) inability to get the name of murdered U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens right, to D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton bizarrely wishing that the Oversight hearings could be conducted with the same “bipartisanship and transparency” offered at the State Department. (No, really, she said that.)

Democrats spent much of the day trotting out an obviously coordinated, utterly ridiculous line about how Republicans were somehow responsible for cutting the budget for embassy defense, even though more Democrats supported the budget in question than Republicans, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Charlene Lamb replied “No, sir” when asked if budget cuts had anything to do with her department’s refusal to provide additional security. Thus was America’s time wasted, at a critical hour, by a goofball political ploy designed to gin up “GOP cheapskates got the Ambassador killed” headlines on left-wing blogs. Bolton is right: the Democrat Party is dangerous.

Bolton thinks the false narrative about the “spontaneous video protest” came directly from President Obama himself, as an expression of pure ideological blindness. He noted that the fastest way to construct an “Administration-wide consensus” is for the Big Guy to tell everyone else what their “consensus” opinion is. The White House was still pushing the “video protest” nonsense long after everyone else at the State Department, and within the intelligence community, was openly describing the incident as a terrorist attack. The only exception was U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, who works for the State Department, but appears to have been subcontracted by Obama as a baloney dispenser.

“For the sake of our country, I wish I could believe it were a cover-up,” said Bolton, “because then that would at leastacknowledge that they understood reality.” But instead, he summed up Obama’s worldview as, “The War on Terror is over, al Qaeda has been defeated, sweetness and light has broken out in Libya – that’s what he thinks!”

He threw in a dash of the “Blame America First” mentality to complete his assessment of Obama’s cognitive dissonance on Libya. “You know, it was that video. We provoked those poor people. Blame America, and don’t blame them.”

Most devastating was Bolton’s final question: “Other than a few preliminary remarks, also on the video, from Hillary Clinton, where has she been? I still think the great unanswered question is why she wasn’t on those five Sunday shows, instead of Susan Rice.”

Greta van Susteren theorized that Clinton didn’t want to associate herself with the “spontaneous video protest” lunacy. I think I can answer Mr. Bolton’s question with a four-digit number: 2016.